Recent reviews by The Great Deflate

+ Simple enough to pick up quickly but deep enough to still be fun after hundreds of hours.
+ Has a clear basic goal: survive, but with plenty of room for your own goals.
+ Artstyle is cohesive and appealing.
+ Has an in-game interface for creating your own maps and a healthy mapmaking community. Many mapmakers are able to create new challenges and playstyles with their maps, adding even more depth.
+ Creativity is encouraged and there is no one "meta" way to do things or lay out your cities.

- The beavers are too cute and it makes me sad when they die.

This is a pretty fun game. I've got a few hundred hours in it and feel like I'm still mastering parts of the gameplay. Almost all of the new systems in the game are very well done, but almost all of them also have something that induces frustration.

The new religious victory mode is a lot of fun, greatly expanding the depth of religion, though religious combat is rather dull.
The new diplomacy system is very intricate, but it is not user-friendly, so it takes quite a bit of consulting the wiki to understand it. I'm still figuring it out but I like how deep it is. Leaders have set agendas and randomized hidden ones, making you have to interact with them in order to figure out their agendas and keep relations amicable.
The civics and science tree split is probably the best new feature. It adds a nice amount of customization for your particular empire and makes you choose how your civilization will advance through the ages.
Policy cards is also a great feature. You can choose several cards to give your civilization bonuses, like a bonus to wonder production, or extra yields from certain strategic resources. Each policy card fits into one of three categories: military, economic, and diplomatic. Each government that you can choose has a different number of each type of policy slots, with some getting wildcard slots as well that can fit any type of policy card, making your choice of government important. You can switch out which policy cards you are using from the pool of unlocked cards at certain points in the game, and this is really well balanced. I feel like I can change my cards often enough to be dynamic without being able to change them on every single turn.
The changes to builders are fantastic and make using them very strategic. I wish they could still lay down roads, though.
Gaining and using gold is still important, but less so than in Civ V, which I think is a good change.
Trade routes take far, far, *far* too long to complete considering that they are the only way to lay down roads before the industrial age.


The art style is overall fantastic. I do like the fog-of-war map, though it is frustrating how much the coloration hides areas that you've already explored. The cartoonish world leaders are a lot of fun, and the animations look good.
The music is really good as always, but a little repetitive. Even though the orchestration changes as you move through the ages, there's only so much that you can listen to a particular melody without getting a bit tired of it. This is especially true if you play a civilization whose melody is based on an already well-known song, like Scarborough Fair, or Hard Times Come Again No More.

And, as always, the two expansion packs (Rise & Fall and Gathering Storm) are very important and make the game significantly better. Rise & Fall introduces Ages, which give you bonuses or penalties depending on how well you perform over a certain amount of time. It also introduces City Loyalty, making you have to put work into keeping your border cities maintained rather than just used as military buffers. Governors are also introduced, giving you the ability for certain cities to be even more powerful, though I think only about half of the governors are actually useful.
Gatheing Storm introduces environmental factors like floods, hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, and volcano eruptions, which can devastate an area. It also introduces climate change, making the borders of the landmasses change in the more future ages.

Overall, a really good game with a few frustrating features. That said, it's a worthy successor to Civ V.

Force powers are fun, but be prepared to die many, many times due to poor level design and utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ knockback from enemies. Forget about 100% completing the game.

This is a solid game. It lacks the brilliance of Borderlands 2, but retains much of what makes the Borderlands series so good. It's a first-person shooter that is built for co-op play. It's crazy and full of unique missions.

Pros:
Very tight combat. The controls are intuitive and give you a lot of freedom.
Interesting story and side missions. The story isn't the reason you should buy this game, but it is solid. The side missions are the real gems, though. Much of the game's humor resides in the incredible variety of side missions.
A real sense of character progression. Your combat experience revolves around your action skill, and you are given a lot of options of how to improve your character and your action skill. From reducing its cooldown to giving yourself bonuses when you kill an enemy to improving your damage and so on.
Very well-made classes. Each of the four base classes are a lot of fun and very unique. Athena is particularly satisfying.
Very small penalties for dying. You are encouraged to experiment and try new things, as the only penalty for dying is losing some of your cash. And since cash isn't too hard to come by in this game, dying is but a minor inconvenience.
The humor in this game hits the mark more often than not. It is a genuinely hilarious game.

Cons:
Solo play suffers. Two of the four base classes (Nisha, CL4P-TP) are difficult to use in solo play unless you are experienced. And one of the DLC characters (Aurelia) is extremely difficult to use in solo play.
An unfortunate amount of backtracking. There is a lot, and I mean A LOT, of backtracking in this game, where you are either just running from one mission point to another or driving in the moon buggy across large swathes of rocky terrain.
Not much variety in environments until the second half of the game. Most of the beginning areas look so much alike that it is hard to recall which area you are actually in.
Bad vehicle controls and terrible terrain for vehicles. The moon buggy handles awfully, and the terrain frequently gets in your way by launching you in unexpected directions.

Verdict: A game that succeeds due to its great combat and dark sense of humor despite frustrations stemming from a lot of backtracking and limitations in solo play. Giving it a 7.5/10.

This game is one of the premier turn-based strategy games of the last decade. You can take any of over 20 civilizations through the ages and win in one of many different ways.

Pros:
Variety of civilizations and victory conditions.
Engaging for hours.
Excellent mod support. There are literally hundreds of high-quality mods of all sorts that add buildings, civilizations, units, wonders, and revamp features such as social policies, technologies, and victory conditions.

Cons:
You really need the DLC in order to get full enjoyment. The base game is sadly missing a lot of key features.
Gameplay can get somewhat repetitive after a certain number of hours. This can be mitigated in part by mods.
It is addictive. Be warned.

While making Borderlands 2, Gearbox took a long hard look at the original Borderlands and found out what worked and what did not. The result is an overall masterpiece.

Borderlands 2 is a beautiful amalagamation of the classic FPS and RPG genres. You are plopped down as one of four Vault Hunters in a wasteland of a planet called Pandora, charged with finding the Vault Key and taking down the evil leader of Hyperion corporation, Handsome Jack.

The game's story is much better than the original game, and is on par with the best stories of the last few years. The gameplay is tight and easy to pick up, not to mention addicting. The setting is well-made and varied, with terrain as varied as it is on Earth.

The playable characters in the game are also very well-designed and unique. Axton has his sentry gun that is like having another player on the battlefield, Maya has her Phaselock that freezes and suspends enemies to make them easier to take out, Salvador has his Gunzerking that enables him to use two guns at once for massive damage, and Zer0 has his Decepti0n that allows his to turn invisible while creating a hologram of him that enemies will attack.

The missions in this game are much more varied than the first game. Though the common "fetch this" and "kill that" missions are present and in abundance, there are also missions where you are invited to commit suicide, put together a birthday party, deliver packages to people within a certain time limit, solve a murder mystery, and start and perpetuate a clan war. Additionally, the missions are rarely dull, and frequently offer nice twists and additional challenges that make them even more fun.

Though this game is obviously geared towards multiplayer, and is at its best when you have four players working together to complete the game's many missions, the solo gamer will get a lot out the game as well. There is no "right" way to play this game; it can support so many different playstyles that it is just plain scary!

But the real gem, the final cog that makes this game a masterpiece is its humor. Though dark humor abounds, this game's writers obviously had a great time with this game, and it shows through the hundreds of times you will laugh while playing this game. Almost nothing in the game takes itself too seriously, and amazingly enough, that doesn't take away from the emotionally rich story. Add to that the above-average (and frequently great) voice acting, and you will truly feel a part of the game itself.

If you like running around, shooting everything in sight, you will love this game.
If you like immersing yourself in a deep story, complete with rich background and compelling events, you will love this game.
If you like creating and customizing a character's abilities so that it is unique to you, you will love this game.
If you like hilarious and witty dialogue and situations, you will love this game.
If you like hundreds of subtle and not-so-subtle pop culture references, you will love this game.

Not to mention, the story DLC is fantastic, especially Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep.

Heck, you will love this game!

Updated after the free DLC released in 2019: More of the same, and that's a good thing.